These diagrams are adapted from students' reports. If they seem absurdly simple, it is well to remember that experience reveals the student's amazing lack of ability to vizualize social relationships without some such device. These diagrams, however, should serve merely as the point of departure. Add to them charts showing the sources of milk and other food supplies of a large city, and a sense of the interdependence and reciprocity of city and country will develop. Take a Mercator's projection map of the world and draw the trade routes and immigration streams to indicate international solidarities. Such diagrams as the famous health tract "A Day in the Life of a Fly" or the story of Typhoid Mary are helpful in establishing how closely a community is bound together.
Problem III: To show the variety and kinds of social activities, i.e., activities that bring two or more people into contact. Have the student note down even the homeliest sorts of such activities, the butcher, the postman, the messenger boy; insist that he go out and look instead of guessing or reading; require him to group these activities under headings which he may work out for himself. He will usually arrive at three or four, such as getting a living, recreation, political. It may be wise to ask him to grade these activities as helpful, harmful, strengthening, or weakening, in order to accustom him to the idea that sociology must treat of good, bad, and indifferent objects.
Problem IV: To determine what the preponderant social interests and activities are as judged by the amount of time men devote to them. Let the student try a "time budget" for a fortnight. For this purpose Giddings suggests a large sheet of paper ruled for a wide left-hand margin and 32 narrow columns: the first 24 columns for hours of the day, the 25th for the word "daily," and the last seven for the seven days of the week. In the margin the student writes the names of every activity of whatever description during the waking hours. This will furnish excellent training in exact habits of observation and recording, and inductive generalization. When the summary is made at the end of the fortnight, the student will have worked for himself the habitual "planes of interest" along which social activities lie.
At this point he ought to have convinced himself that the subject matter of sociology is concrete reality, not moonshine. Moreover, he should be able to lay down certain fundamental marks of a social group, such as a common impulse to get together, common sentiments, ideas, and beliefs, reciprocal service. From the discovery of habitual planes of interest (self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, self-assertion, self-subordination, etc.) it is a simple step to show diagrammatically how each interest impels an activity, which tends to precipitate itself into a social habit or institution.
| INNER URGE OR INTEREST (INSTINCT OR DISPOSITION) | MOTOR EXPRESSION IN ACTIVITY | RESULTANT GROUP HABIT OR INSTITUTION |
| Hunger; Will-to-live Self-Maintenance | The food-quest | Economic technique property, invention, material arts of life |
| Sex: Self-Perpetuation | Procreation and parenthood | The family, ancestor worship, courts of domestic relations, patriarchal government, etc. |
To make sociology real make it egocentric
The way is now clear for the two next steps, the concepts of causation and development. Here again why not follow the egocentric plan of starting with what the student knows? Ask him to write a brief but careful autobiography answering the questions—How have I come to be what I am? What influences personal or otherwise have played upon me?[[34]] The student is almost certain to lay hold of the principle of determining or controlling forces, and of evolution or change; he may even be able to analyze rather clearly the different types of control which have coöperated in his development.
From this start it is easy to develop the genetic concept of social life. The individual grows from simple to complex. Why not the race? Here introduce a comparison between the social group known to the student, a retarded group (such as MacClintock's or Vincent's study of the Kentucky Mountaineers[[35]]) or a frontier community, and a contemporary primitive tribe (say, the Hupa or Seri Indians, Negritos, Bontoc Igorot, Bangala, Kafirs, Yakuts, Eskimo, or Andaman Islanders). Require a detailed comparison arranged in parallel columns on such points as size, variety of occupation, food supply, security of life, institutions, family life, language, religion, superstitions, and opportunities for culture.
These two points of departure—the student's interest in his own personality and the community influences that have molded it, and the comparative study of a primitive group—should harmonize the two chief rival views of teaching sociologists; namely, those who urge the approach to sociology through anthropology and those who find the best avenue through the concrete knowledge of the socius. Moreover, it lays a foundation for a discussion of the antiquity of man, his kinship with other living things, and his evolution; that is, the biological presupposition of human society. Here let me testify to the great help which Osborn's photographs[[36]] of reconstructions of the Pithecanthropos, Piltdown, Neanderthal, and Crô-Magnon types have rendered in clearing away prejudices and in vivifying the remote past. Religious apprehensions in particular may be allayed also by referring students to articles on race, man, evolution, anthropology, etc., in such compilations as the Catholic Encyclopedia and Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. The opening chapters in Marett's little book on Anthropology are so sanely and admirably written that they also clear away many prejudices and fears.